Paul Dirac, another legend who was deeply involved in the development of Quantum Mechanics in the decade of 1920-1930's. He was closely associated with other luminaries and visionaries of that era and was highly admired for his simple, deep-rooted physical interpretations without delving too much into Mathematics. His main contributions were fixing the "FREE PARTICLE" problem in Quantum Mechanics by employing Dirac-Delta functions, extending the probabilistic interpretation given by Max Born to many other branches of Physics and Science and formulating the Quantum Mechanics for the relativistic cases.
Here is an transcripted interview of Paul Dirac that I have found at the American Institute of Physics Web-page on Neils Bohr's library and Archives. The interview was taken by great Philosophers (Thomas J. Kuhn and Paul Wigner) who were contemporary to Paul Dirac but were not technically (or mathematically) involved in the development of Quantum Mechanics. Since, they were good friends and great admirers of each other, the straightforward and direct questions are really interesting and reply from Dirac are quite impressive!
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2 comments:
Interesting article ... we get to see how a great mind works and you can notice the difference in mere conversation. Off course he is believed to suffer from autism of some degree and his natural conditioning plus is social conditioning helped him become one of the leading contributors to Physics.
I wonder how so many scientific minds discount the existence of God and consider it as a work of human imagination. Dirac's statement in that regard is probably one of the best arguments I have heard, probably only second to that from Noam Chomsky.
There are plenty of anecdotes that involve witty statements made by Dirac and if you read them you are reminded of Sheldon's character in the 'Big bang theory' TV series. It is now obvious that Sheldon's character was inspired from Dirac's life. With one difference - Dirac was modest, Sheldon off course is not.
There is one anecdote involving Dirac that Roger Penrose shared in a talk that i was attending. IT goes like this - After one of his lectures when Dirac asked for any questions from the audience, one member got up to say that he did not understand something in the just concluded lecture. To which Dirac nodded - acknowledged the man and then waited for the audience to throw up questions. For Dirac - by stating that the man did not understand a portion of the lecture was making a statement and was not really asking a question. So he acknowledged the statement but did feel obliged to answer since it was not a question.
There is a typo in the last statement of my previous comment.
'So he acknowledged the statement but did NOT feel obliged to respond since it was not a question.'
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